This cinema plays The Rocky Horror Picture Show – all the time: why you should visit Munich’s Museum Lichtspiele

Munich’s gloriously camp Museum Lichtspiele, which has been playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show almost continually since 1977, is a celebration of German kink camaraderie

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Stephen McCarty

Published: 10:00am, 27 Jul 2024Updated: 3:02pm, 6 Aug 2024

Munich, eh? All right, so it’s not Christopher Isherwood’s Jazz Age Berlin of the 1930s, with its sordid carryings-on and illicit sexual liaisons.

But it’s not all Teutonic rigidity and buttoned-up, BMW boardroom types either: plenty of online “niche” interest sites promise local excitement centred on more than bratwurst, beer and football. Manifold are the online notices advertising the pleasures of fetish parties, transgender escort services and BDSM clubs.

Which, in a kind of gross squaring of the historical circle, is (tightly) fitting: following the militarisation of Germany a century ago, SS uniforms were stylishly set off by bondage-suggestive leather straps and shiny boots, as favoured by the sadistic thugs of the Nazi Party. After all, the creed that had poisoned their minds had enjoyed its preliminary publicity in Munich’s beer halls, where Adolf Hitler found a malleable audience.

The cover of The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack vinyl record. Photo: Stephen McCarty

In creating his masterpiece, The Rocky Horror Show musical, which morphed into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Richard O’Brien was playing with the fetishism of power at the heart of fascism: leather jacket, fishnet stockings and heels equals twisted military clobber. So it seems somehow appropriate that the movie should have found a permanent home in a corner of Munich that is forever Transylvania.

From the late 19th century until 1929 and the worldwide depression, a transvestite subculture prospered in a relatively enlightened Germany. That all ended under a jackboot, but eventually its flame was rekindled, 20 minutes’ stroll from Marienplatz in Munich city centre, by the Museum Lichtspiele, a cinema on the east bank of the Isar River cheekily taking part of its name from the august Deutsches Museum nearby. Built into the ground floor of a venerable tenement block and opened in 1910, this is no anonymous multiplex.

Museum Lichtspiele’s cult status is assured by its being the oldest remaining operational cinema in Munich, but is undoubtedly burnished by its showing, more or less continually, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show since its release in West Germany in 1977. Meaning the cinema has done the “Time Warp” again. And again, and again, and … Essential renovations have proved just about the only means of stopping Tim Curry strutting his outrageous Dr Frank-N-Furter transsexual stuff.

Munich’s Museum Lichtspiele first opened its doors in 1910. Photo: Stephen McCarty

The four-screen establishment (maximum 280 patrons) runs the film (in English) every Friday and Saturday night in a theatre decorated in homage to sets from the movie – red velour, cheap statuary, dingy lighting – and in-character dressing up is naturally encouraged.